In a recent Forrester Benchmarks report on B2C email marketing campaigns, 90 percent failed to pass a basic performance review. Marketing professionals across multiple industries, including retail, are not using email to its full potential. That means lost sales.

How can you prevent this from happening to your business? Start by implementing high-performance strategies to improve email deliverability, list segmentation, personalization, and cross-channel integration. Those are the main areas where many retail companies are having difficulty.

To get better results with your email marketing campaigns, we’ve outlined four common pitfalls to avoid and provided some best practices to guide you in the right direction.

Pitfall #1: Poor email deliverability

Deliverability is critical to the success of your email marketing campaigns. Your emails must be delivered so that people can open, read, and respond to your messages. At Sailthru, we make this process easier by offering full-service deliverability as part of our platform. Beyond technical solutions, however, there are several best practices you can implement now to improve your email deliverability, including:

Pitfall #2: Ineffective list segmentation

You’ve probably heard that the money is in the list. That’s true only if you segment your list properly. With effective segmentation, you can get better open and click-through rates. You can also drive email conversions and maximize ROI by targeting the right individuals. Implement the following best practices for list segmentation to improve the results of your email marketing campaigns.

• Create customer personas to target the right audience

• Map out the customer lifecycle so you can meet buyers at their point of need

Pitfall #3: Lack of personalization

Personalization is the best way to improve the customer experience. If you aren’t personalizing your emails, you are likely turning customers away. A Customer Experience Impact Report conducted by Harris Interactive found that “89 percent of consumers began doing business with a competitor following a poor customer experience.” Don’t let that happen to your business by implementing these best practices.

Pitfall #4: No cross-channel campaign management

Consumers are more connected than ever. You need to be everywhere your customers are to stay competitive in the digital retail marketplace. Cross-channel campaign management is a significant challenge for retail marketers. Sailthru can help by creating a seamless shopping experience across all channels so you get better results with your email marketing campaigns. Here are some best practices to get you started.

• Measure and track customer actions across different channels

• Respond in real-time to your customers

• Use predictive analytics for a more personal experience

Read this blog post for more on how Sailthru can help you coordinate email, web, and mobile experiences in real-time.